Bladed Magic Read online

  It only took a few seconds to decide.

  A flick of my wrist sent a dagger into my palm. I checked the hall behind me once more. Then, with a desperate hope, I flung it. Once it left my person, the blade would be visible. But not for long. I held my breath, watched as it buried inside in the black eye of the camera. It sparked and then the faint buzz I’d heard from the electronic piece of equipment went silent.

  I didn’t waste another second.

  Chip in—check.

  The box slid out like butter and I grabbed everything I could get my hands on, dumping it into my bag. Something started to flutter free and I caught it, shoved it in as well.

  The box wouldn’t close and it took a sweaty ten seconds to realize why—I had to take the chip out. I shoved it inside my bra and froze. Warning slithered up my spine. Slipping out of the room, I made it into the main area just as the door slid open. Back pressed to the wall nearest the door, I watched as four NHs spread out, each of them looking around.

  A wolf.

  A witch.

  Some sort of offshoot who made my bones ache with the power in him.

  A pale man who could be nothing other than a vampire. He tensed and lifted his head, nostrils flared as though he was scenting the air.

  “Check the room,” the witch said softly. “See if you can find what knocked the camera off line.”

  The vampire inclined his head and moved out of there, all liquid, eerie grace that sent nerves firing through me.

  I edged closer to the door.

  It had sealed shut.

  Fuck.

  “I’ll check on Waterby,” the wolf said, his lip curling in a way reminiscent of an angry wolf’s. “Make sure she didn’t do anything just to be a pain.”

  “Behave,” the witch said, her voice soft with warning.

  The wolf laughed and headed through the door.

  Something crackled from her belt and she frowned, pulled it off. “Yes?”

  “We’ve…got a problem.” It was a man’s voice, hollow and distant, echoing through the radio as his words cut in and out.

  “I’m busy—”

  “There’s a witch out here and if somebody doesn’t step in, he just might kill a wolf. The idiot got in the witch’s face and I guess the stupid whelp didn’t realize what he was messing with.”

  “Son of a bitch!” The woman whirled around. I braced myself. She shot a look at the offshoot. “You wait here.”

  I didn’t bother to wait for anything else because the door was opening. I held my breath and cut around the corner just as she slapped her hand on the panel.

  “You…”

  Her voice echoed throughout the wide, cavernous space of the exchange.

  The smell of blood was thick on the air but I didn’t look for the source. I just needed to keep moving.

  Then she spoke again and I froze at her words.

  “Justin, you son of a bitch, if you kill somebody on my watch, I’ll peel your skin from your hide.”

  His laugh was bright, hard-edged and when I turned my head to look at him, he stood in front of a wolf—the wolf wasn’t on the floor, though. He was pinned to a wall with what looked like…fire.

  “Come on, Scylla. I’m just defending myself,” Justin said.

  A quick look at his face revealed four, broad stripes that shown red and wet against his skin. “The pup attacked me.”

  “Fucking…witch,” the wolf growled.

  Justin tsked. “You should watch your mouth.”

  “Let him down, Justin.” The witch all but snarled the final word. “Now.”

  I slid out the door and ran to the alley where I’d first shown Justin what I could do. There, and only there, did I let that cloak of invisibility slip, then fade away. Once I thought I could breathe without panting, I moved back out onto the street. Justin was at the door now but they hadn’t yet chased him off. I had one foot on the steps when he tensed, then cast a look back at me.

  Something that might have been relief flashed through his eyes but it was gone in a blink.

  “You know what you need, Sly?” he asked, peering up at the witch. “You need…”

  She shoved out a hand and Justin went flying.

  He landed at my feet and I practically jumped out of the way. He lay there, stunned for a second and then he rolled to his knees, laughing. “Damned if I’m not right.” Then he was on his feet and smiling down at me. “Hello, Kitty. You done shopping?”

  Shopping?

  The crowd at the top of the steps parted.

  My skin started to crawl and that alone told me who it was.

  Get away…get away…

  Not many evoked that visceral of a response in me. But if my gut told me to stay away from the Cat alpha? I’d damn well do it.

  “Sure,” I said, the word coming from me with relative ease. “Done shopping.”

  As I fell into step next to Justin, I was vaguely aware of the two cat shifters coming down the stairs. And almost painfully aware that at least one of them watched me.

  I didn’t look back to see which one.

  “Pieces of them.” I stared at the pictures all around us, my skin crawling in revulsion. “He kept all of this because he needs pieces of them.”

  Justin didn’t respond as he continued to sift through the pictures and the pages. Some of the pages had clearly been torn from diaries—many of them written by different hands. The girls he’d stolen. He’d watched them, I realized. Watched, hunted, stalked.

  Then he’d taken.

  Destroyed.

  “Trophies,” Justin said after a minute, his voice thick with rage.

  “It’s not just that.” There were squares of fabric, too, nine of them. Cut from clothing, I suspected. Was there a tenth? We’d find out, once we found him.

  Some of the fabric showed signs of age.

  “How much trouble will we be in if it’s discovered we stole this?” I asked quietly.

  Justin slid me a look. “If we’d been discovered? Quite a bit. Now that it’s done, considering what we found? Not much, if any. All I’d have to do was explain about my job—it gives me a lot of leeway. All I’d have to do was show them what we found. The Assembly would talk to the parents of the girls and for all I know, they’d slap me with some extra help.”

  I nodded. That was one worry off my back at least.

  Absently, I continued to rub one of the squares of fabric with my thumb. Acutely, I was aware of something that sickened me. He’d done this, the man we hunted. He’d sat in the middle of his trophies and touched them, rubbed them with his hands…and remembered.

  He’d need something else to remember them by…now.

  It hit me, then. Where I should look. Hit me so hard and fast, I thought my heart would explode out of my chest.

  “Where are they buried?”

  Justin shot me a look. “There were a lot of kids, Kit. They’ll be buried in several places. Besides, he’s going to be looking for his next target, not stroking off to the memories of the poor kids he killed.”

  I curled my lip and something of what I felt must have cut through because his hands stilled and he looked up. A sigh escaped him. “Sorry. Look, I’m an ass to work with and I say whatever shit comes to mind. That doesn’t mean I’m not pissed off and hurting for what he did to those babies. What I want to do is get him before he grabs the next one—which means finding his trolling grounds.”

  My gut said otherwise.

  He wasn’t hunting, yet.

  But how did I explain a gut instinct to a guy who had clearly been doing this far longer than I had?

  “Have a computer I can use?” I asked softly.

  Justin jerked a shoulder in a shrug and pointed off to the side table. “Have at it. We need to narrow down the area. There’s got to be something in common—predators like routine. If we can just pinpoint the area, or even a smaller area, then I’ve got things I can use.”

  I was already tuning him out.

  He could pinpoint
all he wanted.

  I had another plan in mind.

  Chapter Six

  Apparently, I had a talent for multi-tasking because while I was digging for the information I needed, I came across a couple of spots that would probably suit Justin. I jotted them down—kept an eye on him—and continued on my search.

  It wasn’t hard.

  The internet made things all too public.

  The internet was the reason why we had been forced out into the open.

  The internet. YouTube. Idiots who couldn’t remember that territory disputes really needed to be settled privately.

  Nobody had publicized anything about the deaths of those girls, not their funerals or anything else.

  But even non-humankind had nosy sons-of-bitches and when you had nosy sons-of-bitches, there were those who’d think it was completely cool to dig into fresh wounds, all in the name of the public has the right to know.

  There was a blog, run by some offshoot that lived near the borderlands, an area I avoided with everything I had in me. I’d heard of him—went by the name of Cyclops, although I had no idea if the name had any real meaning. He did use a one-eyed monster as the icon for the blog. The blog was a news site and most of it, to his credit, was researched and it tended to focus on news about other offshoots, the Assembly, the witch houses, lower-ranking wolves and cats and happenings outside of East Orlando. I suspect he was more than a little afraid of the Wolf Pack and the Cat Clan. Usually people with brains were.

  That blog gave me the information I needed, detailing the funerals for the slain girls and where they’d have memorials, if they’d have them at all. Without bodies, some families chose not to do anything, hoping against hope that the child would somehow make it back to them.

  Four bodies had been recovered.

  Two had been placed in the same cemetery, one that had been built in the narrow strip of land where cat and wolf land intersected.

  But that wasn’t the one that made my blood burn.

  It was the listing below.

  The little red-haired cat. The facts surrounding her death, and what had happened after, flashed through my mind. Her parents had tried to go to the Cat alpha for help. The father had been killed just daring something so trivial. Nothing about that was printed, but those were the rumors riffling through the cat shifter community and I could believe it.

  The mother, missing still.

  The girl had been buried in the graveyard near an old church well outside East Orlando.

  “Find anything?”

  Clumsily, I shoved the datapad toward Justin. It was the information he’d been looking for. Useless in my opinion.

  As he looked it over, I cleared the computer’s history and closed the windows.

  I don’t know if I managed an innocent look when I looked back at him but I did my best. He nodded at me and said, “We’ll hit all three. If he’s been in the area, I’ll be able to tell—”

  “You can do it.” I pushed back from the table and looked around for my bag, avoiding his gaze. “You nearly got my ass locked in an Assembly vault earlier. I’m not even in the Assembly so I don’t have the pitiful rights they’d allow me. They could have just killed me where I stood. I got you the information you needed. Take it from there.”

  When I turned around to look at him, he was watching me with eyes devoid of emotion.

  After a moment, he took a step closer. “So. Just like that. Ready to go back to pouring drinks for lowlifes already?”

  “Hey, the tips are decent.” Actually, most of the time they sucked and people looked at me like I was the next up on the menu. But it was predictable. It was safe. And…I wasn’t heading back there yet anyway. He didn’t need to know…

  The gleam in his eyes had my spine twitching. “Is that right?”

  I went to dodge around him and he shot out an arm. “Tell me something, Kitty. What did you find when you were digging around online?”

  He leaned in and when I took a breath to steady my nerves, it flooded my head with the scent of him. Whoa…he smelled…whoa. My belly started to twist and to my utter shock, it wasn’t the fear I’d expected. Men usually either freaked me out or just caused a…whatever response. Justin, though, with that wicked grin and the reckless attitude was something else. And now I had the scent of him flooding me. He smelled like magic. He smelled like grass and summer and abruptly, I had an image of him across from me, grinning as he came at me with a sword.

  It wasn’t a frightening image.

  He’d said something about sparring—my head spun with that image and when it stopped spinning, the images shifted, reformed. And now…he was coming at me again, all right. But in a different way. His naked skin to mine. Our breath mingling.

  “You’re going to make me lose track of the job here,” he murmured.

  I blinked and eased back, half-expecting the moment to shatter, sending shards of glass into my flesh. I almost welcomed it. But instead, he reached out, rested a hand on my forearm. That light contact pulled a gasp out of me. It was like grabbing magic out of the air, his skin on mine. It wasn’t painful, but it sent sparks of sensation jolting through me.

  I couldn’t move, could barely breathe as he moved in and dipped his head. The heavy fall of his hair fell around us as he brushed his lips against my cheek. “I knew the second I looked at you that you were going to be trouble. Turns out I’m right,” he whispered against my skin.

  I tensed, terrified.

  “I kinda like trouble. But…”

  He pulled back and my heart slammed, too hard and too fast, against my ribs. “This is the kind of trouble that requires some time, some attention. So we’ll just let it wait a little while. At least until this job is done.”

  Curling my hands into fists, I let my nails cut into my skin, that slight pain focusing me enough so I could come back down to earth. “That’s fine,” I said. Was that my voice? That raspy, erratic tremble? Clearing my throat, I tried again. “That’s just fine. You go finish the job. I did my part.”

  I edged around him.

  “You never did tell me what you found,” he called out behind me.

  “Sure I did. I gave you the information.”

  He chuckled. “Kitty, you’ve got a lot to learn about the world you live in. Here’s your next lesson.”

  I made the mistake of glancing back at him.

  His eyes were gleaming and that wide, taunting smile was firmly in place. His gaze dropped to linger on my mouth for a moment and my heart started to race all over again.

  “You can’t lie to a witch. We see it. But you go on ahead…poke around, see what you can find.” Then he winked. “Tell you what, Kitty-kitty. If you find that runner before I do, I’ll let you try to beat me up. You won’t win, though.”

  I gaped at him. “Who said I wanted to fight you?” Then blood rushed to my face as my own thoughts taunted me.

  “Don’t you?” He rocked back on his heels. “It’s not about fighting, though. It’s called fun. It’s not like you don’t like those weapons you pack around. I know better. I saw the way you were all but drooling over the ones on my wall. Go on. Go see if you can’t pull a thread free and figure out something about this monster we got on the run.”

  He turned back to the large table. “Find him. I dare you.”

  I was half through the door when he said, “Hey. Catch.”

  I barely caught the keys. Staring at them, I scowled.

  “You’ll do better if you have wheels.”

  Find him. I dare you.

  Arrogant peacock.

  I made a face at the dials on the dashboard and tried to remember the lessons Goliath had given me the past summer.

  I knew how to drive. I had driven a car, a few times.

  But this one had a lot more bells and whistles than Goliath’s old van.

  “Works the same way,” I muttered. It had to. It had a key. It had four wheels. It operated on a road.

  I passed the keycard over the ignition area and
when it purred to life, I smiled, pleased.

  Okay.

  I managed that much.

  The smile lasted exactly fifteen seconds. My screech of terror took a little longer to fade. I damn near drove the car through the front of Justin’s house.

  Panting, I gripped the wheel and stared at the porch in front of me. I gulped and then looked down at the lettered area. I’d wanted to pull the car around. I’d pressed on the gas.

  Looking up, I saw Justin standing on the porch, arms crossed over his chest.

  Already this wasn’t going well.

  I eyed the letters again. I’d just given it too much gas—no. This was too new. It wasn’t going to operate on gas. Too much of whatever fuel it used. Sleek and shiny as it was, it probably had a duel engine, solar and e. Slowly, I shifted into reverse and lightly touched the pedal. It glided back, nice and easy.

  Much better.

  Although he continued to watch me, I didn’t look at him as I swung the car around and headed off down the lane.

  It would serve him right if I just headed south to TJ’s. She could call him to come get his car—it might or might not be in the same condition it was in now.

  But while the peacock might deserve it, the girls…

  Yeah.

  Okay.

  I pulled up a mental image of the maps I’d studied.

  Then, with Colleen’s voice urging me on, I turned and headed northwest.

  You’re guided by those instincts.

  I hoped Colleen was right.

  There was a little market in the store close to the cemetery. I pulled over. I had to pee, I needed a drink and as I stood at the counter, my eyes fell on the display of flowers near the register.

  I hated flowers.

  Well, not if they were in the ground.

  Cutting them like that was a human thing.

  Of course, I was in a human place of business so it wasn’t surprising I’d see them there. I didn’t understand it. People cut flowers, take them out of their natural habitat and already they are dying. I could even faintly smell that coming death—it wasn’t unpleasant, not yet. But it was a flat scent of…lifelessness. Still, I found myself gazing at the flowers.